Review:
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson
| Translator: |
Reg Keeland |
| Series: |
Millennium #1 |
| Publisher: |
Vintage Crime |
| Copyright: |
2005, 2008 |
| Printing: |
June 2009 |
| ISBN: |
0-307-47347-3 |
| Format: |
Mass market |
| Pages: |
644 |
As
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo opens, Mikael Blomkvist is
losing a criminal libel suit in Swedish court. His magazine,
Millennium, published his hard-hitting piece of investigative
journalism that purported to reveal sketchy arms deals and financial
crimes by Hans-Erik Wennerstr m, a major Swedish businessman. But the
underlying evidence didn't hold up, and Blomkvist could offer no real
defense at trial. The result is a short prison stint for him (postponed
several months into this book) and serious economic danger for
Millennium.
Lisbeth Salander is a (very) freelance investigator for Milton Security.
Her specialty is research and background checks: remarkably thorough,
dispassionate, and comprehensive. She's almost impossible to talk to,
tending to meet nearly all questions with stony silence, but Dragan
Armansky, the CEO of Milton Security, has taken her partly under his
wing. She, and Milton Security, were hired by a lawyer named Dirch Frode
to do a comprehensive background check on Mikael Blomkvist, which she and
Dragan present near the start of the book. The reason, as the reader
discovers in a few more chapters, is that Frode's employer wants to offer
Blomkvist a very strange job.
Over forty years ago, Harriet Vanger, scion of one of Sweden's richest
industrial families, disappeared. Her uncle, Henrik Vanger, has been
obsessed with her disappearance ever since, but in forty years of
investigation has never been able to discover what happened to her. There
are some possibilities for how her body could have been transported off
the island the Vangers (mostly) lived, and live, on, but motive and
suspects are still complete unknowns. Vanger wants Blomkvist to try his
hand under the cover of writing a book about the Vanger family. Payment
is generous, but even more compelling is Henrik Vanger's offer to give
Blomkvist documented, defensible evidence against Wennerstr m at the end
of the year.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (the original Swedish title is
M n som hatar kvinnor, "Men who hate women") is the first of three
mystery novels written at the very end of Stieg Larsson's life, all
published posthumously. They made quite a splash when they were
published: won multiple awards, sold millions of copies, and have resulted
in four movies to date. I've had a copy of the book sitting around for a
while and finally picked it up when in the mood for something a bit
different.
A major disclaimer up front: I read very little crime and mystery fiction.
Every genre has its own conventions and patterns, and regular genre
readers often look for different things than people new to that genre. My
review is from a somewhat outside and inexperienced perspective, which may
not be useful for regular genre readers.
I'm also a US reader, reading the book in translation. It appears to be a
very good translation, but it was also quite obvious to me that
The
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was written from a slightly different set of
cultural assumptions than I brought to the book. This is one of the
merits of reading books from other cultures in translation. It can be
eye-opening, and can carry some of the same thrill as science fiction or
fantasy, to hit the parts of the book that question your assumptions. But
it can also be hard to tell whether some striking aspect of a book is due
to a genre convention I wasn't familiar with, a Swedish cultural
assumption that I don't share, or just the personal style of the author.
A few things do leap out as cultural differences. Blomkvist has to spend
a few months in prison in the middle of this book, and that entire
experience is completely foreign to an American understanding of what
prison is like. The degradation, violence, and awfulness that are
synonymous with prison for an American are almost entirely absent. He
even enjoys the experience as quiet time to focus on writing a history of
the Vangers (Blomkvist early on decides to take his cover story seriously,
since he doubts he'll make any inroads into the mystery of Harriet's
disappearance but can at least get a book out of it). It's a minor
element in the book, glossed over in a few pages, but it's certainly
eye-opening for how minimum security prison could be structured in a
civilized country.
Similarly, as an American reader, I was struck by how
hard Larsson
has to work to ruin Salander's life. Although much of the book is written
from Blomkvist's perspective (in tight third person), Lisbeth Salander is
the titular girl with the dragon tattoo and becomes more and more involved
in the story as it develops. The story Larsson wanted to tell requires
that she be in a very precarious position legally and socially. In the
US, this would be relatively easy, particularly for someone who acts like
Salander does. In Sweden, Larsson has to go to monumental efforts to find
ways for Salander to credibly fall through Sweden's comprehensive social
safety net, and still mostly relies on Salander's complete refusal to
assist or comply with any form of authority or support. I've read a lot
about differences in policies around social support between the US and
Scandinavian countries, but I've rarely read something that drove the
point home more clearly than the amount of work a novelist has to go to in
order to mess up their protagonist's life in Sweden.
The actual plot is slow-moving and as much about the psychology of the
characters as it is about the mystery. The reader gets inside the
thoughts of the characters occasionally, but Larsson shows far more than
tells and leaves it to the reader to draw more general conclusions.
Blomkvist's relationship with his long-time partner and
Millennium
co-founder is an excellent example: so much is left unstated that I would
have expected other books to lay down in black and white, and the
characters seem surprisingly comfortable with ambiguity. (Some of this
may be my genre unfamiliarity; SFF tends to be straightforward to a fault,
and more literary fiction is more willing to embrace ambiguous
relationships.) While the mystery of Harriet's disappearance forms the
backbone of the story, rather more pages are spent on Blomkvist navigating
the emotional waters of the near-collapse of his career and business, his
principles around investigation and journalism, and the murky waters of
the Vanger's deeply dysfunctional family.
Harriet's disappearance is something of a locked room mystery. The day
she disappeared, a huge crash closed the only bridge from the island to
the mainland, both limiting suspects and raising significant questions
about why her body was never found on the island. It's also forty years
into the past, so Blomkvist has to rely on Henrik Vanger's obsessive
archives, old photographs, and old police reports. I found the way it
unfolded to be quite satisfying: there are just enough clues to let
Blomkvist credibly untangle things with some hard work and research, but
they're obscure enough to make it plausible that previous investigators
missed them.
Through most of this novel, I wasn't sure what I thought of it. I have a
personal interest in Blomkvist's journalistic focus wrongdoing by rich
financiers but I had trouble warming to Blomkvist himself. He's a very
passive, inward character, who spends a lot of the early book reacting to
things that are happening to him. Salander is more dynamic and honestly
more likable, but she's also deeply messed up, self-destructive, and does
some viciously awful things in this book. And the first half of the book
is very slow: lots of long conversations, lots of character introduction,
and lots of Blomkvist wandering somewhat aimlessly. It's only when
Larsson gets the two protagonists together that I thought the book started
to click. Salander sees Blomkvist's merits more clearly than the reader
can, I think.
I also need to give a substantial warning:
The Girl with the Dragon
Tattoo is a very violent novel, and a lot of that violence is sexual. By
mid-book, Blomkvist realizes that Harriet's disappearance is somehow
linked with a serial killer whose trademark is horrific, sexualized
symbolism drawn from Leviticus. There is a
lot of rape here,
including revenge rape by a protagonist. If that sort of thing is likely
to bother you, you may want to steer way clear.
That said, despite the slow pace, the nauseating subject matter, the
occasionally very questionable ethics of protagonists, and a twist of the
knife at the very end of the novel that I thought was gratuitously nasty
on Larsson's part and wasn't the conclusion I wanted, I found myself
enjoying this. It has a different pace and a different flavor than what I
normally read, the characters are deep and complex enough to play off each
other in satisfying ways, and Salander is oddly compelling to read about.
Given the length, it's a substantial investment of time, but I don't
regret reading it, and I'm quite tempted to read the sequel. I'm not sure
this is the sort of book I can recommend (or not recommend) given my lack
of familiarity with the genre, but I think US readers might get an
additional layer of enjoyment out of seeing how different of a slant the
Swedish setting puts on some of the stock elements of a crime novel.
Followed by
The Girl Who Played with Fire.
Rating: 7 out of 10
While the creation of Debian packages is 
Last week was quite split into many smaller tasks - working on our libraries (both 
.
Further I used the upload of poppler (DLA 446-1) to test the workflow of the new wheezy-security upload. Uploading and building packages worked perfectly. Unfortunately the push to the security mirrors was a bit delayed (it only happened after an upload of the security team). But this seems to be fixed by Ansgar now.
Last but not least I had a look at PHP5. I think I will start my regular uploads in May.
Other stuff
As I had to deal with non-Debian stuff this month, I didn t do lots of other things. I only uploaded node-uml
Why? , you might ask, would one want to run something other than the most recent version of Maven on the very newest and fangledest breed of the linux distribution we have all loved for so long.
Because! , I might answer, I m trying to get the 
On 1st May 2006
Here is my monthly update covering a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world (
I'm currently in Vienna for 
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A new release of 